As an alumnus of the University of Texas Law School and the father of a recent UT graduate, I pay close attention to what is going on at my alma mater. Sadly, I have witnessed at UT many of the ailments afflicting higher education generally: rising tuition, declining academic performance, bloated…
Year: 2017
Monumental Dishonesty
Walk around any college campus, and you will see the names of distinguished faculty and generous donors adorning most of the buildings. Likewise, many campuses feature statues, memorials, or plaques dedicated to individuals or events of historical significance to that particular school, or the sc…
Robert Bork’s Second Amendment
Readers of Law and Liberty may have noticed that I am a fan of Justice Antonin Scalia (for example, here and here). I am also an admirer of Robert H. Bork, whom my colleague John McGinnis has described as “the most important legal scholar on the right in the last 50 years.” Bork was a pioneer…
I Heard the Voice of Scalia
Fans of the late Justice will treasure a new collection of his speeches. Justice Antonin Scalia definitely had a way with words. Law students pore over his opinions not just for Scalia’s keen analysis but to delight in the verve of his prose—pungent, clear, combative, and always colorful. S…
Texas’s top law officer, Ken Paxton, faces an unjustified legal gauntlet.
Since his landslide election in 2014, Texas attorney general Ken Paxton has been a preeminent advocate for state sovereignty. The Republican has led numerous multi-state coalitions in litigation to resist federal overreach, winning significant courtroom victories against the Obama administration.…
Our Living (That Is, Amendable) Constitution
Proponents of “living constitutionalism” or other non-originalist theories of constitutional law sometimes argue that our now 230-year-old Constitution wasn’t designed for current social conditions. Prevailing attitudes on a variety of subjects have changed dramatically since 1787, critics …
Provocateur Journalism
CNN uncritically publishes a list of “hate groups” compiled by the discredited Southern Poverty Law Center. When a news organization reports an impending weather event based on forecasts from the National Weather Service, or warns of potential seismic activity anticipated by the U.S. Geologic…
Showdown Coming over Antidiscrimination Law
A recent prediction in this space turned out to be premature. In my post about the Seventh Circuit’s en banc decision in Hively v. Ivy Tech Community College[1]—which held that the word “sex” in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 [2] includes “sexual orientation”—I forecast t…
The ‘9th Circus’ is Badly Broken—Let’s Fix It
The Sacramento Bee recently editorialized in defense of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, a frequently (and legitimately) maligned court that has periodically been the target of barbs by President Donald Trump—among other critics. The 9th Circuit, headquartered in San Francisco, is by far …
Leaving Lochner Behind
What prompts a man to change his mind on a serious matter after 35 years, and should the reversal be met with pride (for eventually getting it right), or chagrin (for taking so long)? For reasons of vanity, I’m going to take a positive tack and choose the former. “Wisdom,” Felix Frankfurter…